Top 71 George Lakoff Quotes
#1. On issue after issue, the counterpoints to the conservative principle of the free market are the progressive principles of human dignity and the common good. We are interested in a market that serves human values, not humans who serve a market. Take
George Lakoff
#2. What takes the place of the strict rules of the Strict Father model is clarity of expectations and empathy. What takes the place of reward and punishment is interdependence, communication, and a true desire to remain affectionately connected to those you live with. F
George Lakoff
#3. These assumptions lead progressives into other traps: assuming that hard facts will persuade voters, that voters are "rational" and vote in their self-interest and on the issues, and that negating a frame is an effective way to argue against it. 5.
George Lakoff
#4. The biology of empathy allows us to comprehend our connection to each other, to other living things, and to the physical world that supports life.
George Lakoff
#5. There are three principal conservative descriptions of conservatism. 1. Conservatism is against big government. 2. Conservatism is for traditional values. 3. Conservatism is just what the Bible tells us. We
George Lakoff
#6. Progressives need a collection of proactive policies and communication techniques to get our own values out on our own terms. "War rooms" and "truth squads" must change frames, not reinforce conservative frames.
George Lakoff
#7. In Nurturant Parent morality, the teenage girl is "in trouble," she needs help and deserves empathy (moral-action Category 2 - helping).
George Lakoff
#8. If we are to know ourselves, philosophy needs to maintain an ongoing dialogue with the sciences of mind.
George Lakoff
#9. The value of art, in Strict Father morality, lies either in its moral value, its entertainment value, its economic value, or its value as a success symbol - a sign of belonging to an elite. All
George Lakoff
#10. Do we really think that the United States will have the protection of innocent Afghans in mind if it rains terror down on the Afghan infrastructure? We are supposedly fighting them because they immorally killed innocent civilians. That made them evil. If we do the same, are we any less immoral?
George Lakoff
#11. The Strict Father model takes as background the view that life is difficult and that the world is fundamentally dangerous.
George Lakoff
#12. Therefore, any social or political system in which people get things they don't earn, or are rewarded for lack of self-discipline or for immoral behavior, is simply an immoral system.
George Lakoff
#13. Strict Father morality requires that there are natural, strict, uniform, unchanging standards of behavior that must be followed if society is to function. Another
George Lakoff
#14. The Public provides freedom ... Individualism begins after the roads are built, after individualists have had an education, after medical research has cured their diseases ...
George Lakoff
#15. For real human beings, the only realism is an embodied realism.
George Lakoff
#16. An important consequence of giving highest priority to the metaphor of Moral Strength is that it rules out any explanations in terms of social forces or social class.
George Lakoff
#17. Affirmative action is about fairness, for redressing widespread unfairness. Conservatives
George Lakoff
#18. Progressives should argue progressivism. We need to get out of issue silos that isolate arguments and keep us from the values and principles that define an overall progressive vision. 2.
George Lakoff
#19. What is punishment and theft to conservatives is civic duty and fairness to liberals. There
George Lakoff
#20. By Strict Father morality, harsh prison terms for criminals and life imprisonment for repeat offenders are the only moral options.
George Lakoff
#21. Private enterprise and private life depend on nurturant morality, but so does freedom in American life. Freedom is what public resources provide - freedom in a way that we take for granted but that needs to be brought out in the open.
George Lakoff
#22. Most conservatives are conservatives because they think they are morally correct.
George Lakoff
#23. In the strict father model, the "free market" plays a significant, implicit role. The market is a competitive system where the disciplined are rewarded through profit, and the undisciplined (and hence immoral) are punished through poverty. The market is an instrument of morality.
George Lakoff
#24. A primary function of the Strict Father model is the protection of innocent children. Opposition to abortion provides an ideal opportunity to assert a protective function and justify Strict Father morality.
George Lakoff
#25. Conservatives don't merely want less government. They want to raise spending for the military - even bring back Star Wars - not reduce it. They want to build more prisons. There is no move to eliminate the drug enforcement agency.
George Lakoff
#26. Rationalism pervades the progressive world. It is one of the reasons progressives have lately been losing to conservatives. Rationalist-based political campaigns miss the symbolic, metaphorical, moral, emotional, and frame-based aspects of political campaigns.
George Lakoff
#27. The rich are thus not just more powerful than the poor, they also have moral authority over the poor and with it the moral responsibility to tell the poor how to live: build self-discipline, work hard, climb the economic ladder, and so become self-reliant. M
George Lakoff
#28. Pragmatic conservatism is less idealistic than central conservatism. The goal is to get ahead, to serve your self-interest. The idealistic parts of conservatism are seen as effective means to achieve that goal.
George Lakoff
#29. The Strict Father (or "authoritarian") model is supposed to make a child strong and better able to function socially. It is supposed to make children into effective leaders. But, in fact, it has the opposite effect.
George Lakoff
#30. The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.
George Lakoff
#31. Metaphysics in philosophy is, of course, supposed to characterize what is real - literally real. The irony is that such a conception of the real depends upon unconscious metaphors.
George Lakoff
#32. In short, philosophical theories are largely the product of the hidden hand of the cognitive unconscious.
George Lakoff
#33. New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and, therefore, new realities. This should be obvious in the case of poetic metaphor, where language is the medium through which new conceptual metaphors are created.
George Lakoff
#34. The moral principles that have priority in each model appear in the other model, but with lesser priorities. Those lesser priorities drastically change the effect of those principles.
George Lakoff
#35. Since the Strict Father model is what holds Strict Father morality together, interference with the pursuit of self-interest threatens the foundations of the whole Strict Father moral framework - from the efficacy of moral strength to the validity of the moral order. The
George Lakoff
#36. Systemic causation must be taught if the effects of global warming are to be seriously understood. The
George Lakoff
#37. Science is fundamentally a moral enterprise, following the moral imperative to seek the truth.
George Lakoff
#38. The mind is inherently embodied.
Thought is mostly unconscious.
Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical.
George Lakoff
#39. I think the issue to bring progressives together should be this most central of all issues - raising children to become responsible, empathetic adults.
George Lakoff
#40. In short, I do not believe the cynical liberal claim that the details of conservative political policies are just due to a self-serving ultrarich conspiracy, though the interests and finances of the ultrarich are certainly engaged.
George Lakoff
#41. The priority list is: 1. The Strength Group 2. Moral Self-Interest 3. Moral Nurturance It
George Lakoff
#42. Instead, progressives should speak in terms of the common concerns of voters - for instance, how a policy will let you send your daughter to college, or how it will let you launch your own business. 12.
George Lakoff
#43. Myth 7: Everyone Can Pull Himself or Herself Up by the Bootstraps.
George Lakoff
#44. One can be both free and economically secure while leading a totally meaningless and empty existence.
George Lakoff
#45. Unless you frame yourself, others will frame you - the media, your enemies, your competitors, your well-meaning friends.
George Lakoff
#46. We know that someone who has channeled his anger into something constructive has not had a cow. How do we know these things?
George Lakoff
#47. You can't understand Twenty-first-Century Politics with an Eighteenth-Century Brain.
George Lakoff
#48. Part of the myth is that these model citizens have been given nothing by the government and have made it on their own. The American Dream is that any honest, self-disciplined, hard-working person can do the same.
George Lakoff
#49. The main concern of the frame is that money be kept in the common wealth (or the hands of the government) in order to be used for the common good. HOW
George Lakoff
#50. New ideas are never entirely new. They must make use of ideas already present in the culture. No conspiracy of the ultrarich explains why conservative ideas make sense to people and what sense they make. Fourth,
George Lakoff
#51. Effective campaigns must communicate the candidates' values and use issues symbolically - as indicative of their moral values and their trustworthiness. Recall
George Lakoff
#52. Therefore, we all start out morally weak, that is, with an overwhelming tendency to do immoral things. Unless our parents intervene to discipline us, we will naturally become immoral. This
George Lakoff
#53. Conservatives talk constantly about the centrality of morality and the family in their politics, while liberals did not talk about these things until conservatives started winning elections by doing so.
George Lakoff
#54. Concentrate on values and principles. Be authentic; stand up for what you really believe. Empathize and connect with the people you are talking to, on the basis of identity - their identity and yours. This
George Lakoff
#55. Any truth must be in a humanly conceptualized and understandable form if it is to be a truth for us. If it's not a truth for us, how can we make sense of its being a truth at all?
George Lakoff
#56. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.
George Lakoff
#57. We categorize as we do because we have the brains and bodies we have and because we interact in the world as we do.
George Lakoff
#58. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities.
George Lakoff
#59. One of the reasons that politics lets us down is that we keep comparing it to our ideal narratives, to politics on TV or in the movies, which is tidier and better fits such structures.
George Lakoff
#61. Patriotism is about improving the lives of one's fellow citizens and improving one's country's contribution to the world. In the conservative moral hierarchy, our country is taken as simply better than other countries. This is jingoism, not true patriotism, which rests on progressive values.
George Lakoff
#62. Since future times are facing toward us, the times following them are further in the future, and all future times follow the present. That is why the weeks to follow are the same as the weeks ahead of us.
George Lakoff
#63. Not surprisingly, the social reality defined by a culture affects its conception of physical reality. What is real for an individual as a member of a culture is a product both of his social reality and of the way in which that shapes his experience of the physical world. Since
George Lakoff
#64. But to conservatives whose value system gives priority to Moral Strength, the problem of drugs is the personal lack of the moral strength to just say no. It is a problem of personal values, not of social change or drug treatment centers.
George Lakoff
#65. Conservatives deny that the private depends on public resources. Citing Ronald Reagan's credo that "The Government is the Problem," conservatives are constantly trying to eliminate public resources and to privatize as much as possible.
George Lakoff
#66. What all this adds up to is the view that nature is there as a resource to be used by man for his self-interest and profit. But, frugality being a virtue, the resource should be "conserved" as much as possible.
George Lakoff
#67. Privatization and deregulation constitute the outsourcing of democratically elected government with a moral mission to corporations that have a profit-making mission. The effect is to turn democracy into corporatocracy. PROFIT
George Lakoff
#68. Acting on empathy for people who are down and out requires that we have a social safety net to secure their freedom. So progressives see Social Security, welfare, and universal health care as increasing freedom. Conservatives
George Lakoff
#69. That is why conservatives are attacking the infrastructure of public education in the country. They have no choice. They are up against an infrastructure full of nurturers, and they don't like it one bit - and they shouldn't like it one bit.
George Lakoff
#70. This contrasts sharply with the progressive view that markets must respect human dignity and serve the common good while pursuing profit.
George Lakoff
#71. To be able to see the world through other people's values and truly empathize with them means that you cannot see all people who have different moral values than yours as enemies to be demonized. There
George Lakoff
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